A Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Crop Yield Prediction Taking Weather Data Associated with Production Management Phases as Input

Accurate crop yield prediction is fundamental to sustainable agricultural management, enabling optimized resource allocation and informed decision-making. However, a critical gap exists in current prediction models: existing approaches overlook the temporal alignment between meteorological conditions and production management phases—defined as the intervals between consecutive agronomic operations (e.g., sowing, fertilization, thinning). This oversight results in suboptimal predictive performance, as conventional whole-season weather aggregation fails to capture phase-sensitive crop–weather interactions. While machine learning (e.g., XGBoost) and deep learning approaches (e.g., CNN, LSTM) have been applied to yield prediction, these models typically treat weather variables as temporally homogeneous inputs, inadequately modeling the correlation between historical yields and phase-specific meteorological patterns. To address this gap, this study proposes CNN-LSTM-AM, an innovative hybrid deep learning model that integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and attention mechanisms (AMs), utilizing weather data explicitly aligned with production management phases as input. The CNN component extracts cross-phase weather patterns, the LSTM captures sequential dependencies across growth stages, and the attention mechanism dynamically weights phase importance based on meteorological conditions. The proposed model is validated using a real-world case study of Bok choy production from an agricultural cooperative in Yunlin County, Taiwan, encompassing 1714 production cycles over eight years (2011–2019). Experimental results demonstrate that CNN-LSTM-AM achieves an RMSE of 1448.24 kg/ha, MAPE of 3.60%, and R 2 of 0.98, outperforming five baseline models—CNN (RMSE = 2919.18), LSTM (RMSE = 2529.74), CNN-LSTM (RMSE = 1516.44), LSTM-AM (RMSE = 2284.64), and XGBoost (RMSE = 3452.47)—representing a notable reduction in prediction error (58% lower RMSE) compared to XGBoost. Furthermore, prediction accuracy improves progressively as harvest time approaches, and phase-specific weather encoding enhances accuracy by 16.5% compared to whole-season averaging. These findings underscore the critical importance of integrating agronomic domain knowledge into data-driven prediction frameworks.